Cine 350 - Comparing Peeping Tom and Psycho

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When Norman meets Marion outside of the lobby after he returns from his house with food, she stands in front of the lobby door while Norman stands in front of the lobby window. His reflection is obvious and could be cinematic cue towards his insanity or his two personalities: his own, and his mother’s. Also, during the parlor scene, Norman has a lot to talk about with Marion. He is mostly just trying to keep small talk, but he says a few things that should have been a red flag, and if Marion had noticed, could have saved her own life. At one point he said, “A boy’s best friend is his mother.” No man in his right mind says that. When he said that line it made me slightly uncomfortable, so it should have made Marion feel a little weirded out.

He desires not so much a woman to talk to, but just someone in general. The audience doesn’t know much about Norman until the end, except the fact that he lives with his mother. He tells Marion, an almost complete stranger, his life story; about how his father died when he was five, his mother remarrying and then tells Marion, “A son is a poor substitute for a lover.” Marion then tries to bring up the possibility of sending her somewhere, and Norman suddenly becomes rather defensive. She apologizes and he asks her, “What do you know about caring?” She does not mean to be rude, but she doesn’t know that Norman is the mother he is talking about and telling him to put her in a home means putting himself in a home. His desire for Marion is shown after she leaves the parlor and returns to her room. As a trademark of Hitchcock’s, Norman is a voyeur. He removes a painting from the wall and watches her undress.

Norman constantly lived in the shadow of his mother. Although she died years earlier, Norman is mentally ill and sometimes his mother comes out in him in weird blackout episodes. The film resists common notions of the family because obviously it’s not normal for a man to psychologically turn into his mother. And also, in a realistic sense, mothers do not normally treat their children the way Norman portrays the way she did.

Both Mark and Norman grew up in unusual households, as well as both their families being completely dysfunctional. Mark’s father used his own son as an experiment, and Norman’s mother is literally part of his sick personality. They both murdered people (usually women), which is an obsession of theirs. The families these too men grew up in shaped them into the monsters they became in adulthood.